The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined a differentiated services (DS) field in IPv4 and IPv6 packet headers. The fields are disclosed in RFC 2474 and RFC 2475. The DS field is used to mark packets for differentiated classes of services for Internet traffic, to support various types of applications and specific business requirements. By marking a packet's DS field, the packet will receive a certain forwarding treatment, or per-hop behavior, at each network node. For example, some packets might be more likely to be dropped than other packets based on their markings. Accordingly, a packet that is “important” and marked with a high precedence level (e.g., from a voice over IP application) would be less likely to be dropped than an “unimportant” packet with a low precedence level (e.g., a packet from website).
However, the DS standard implemented by the IETF has several shortcomings. One limitation of the DS standard is that Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) applications are still influenced by bursty packet loss behavior. For instance, TCP Reno may timeout with the dropping of three consecutive packets. Another limitation of the DS standard is that it does not necessarily handle packets from a plurality of flows to a single aggregate in a fair manner. For example, a first flow might be able to monopolize a TCP application to the detriment of other flows. Accordingly, the first flow would have its packets marked with a high precedence while packets from other flows might be marked with a lower precedence, leading to packet loss from the other flows.
Therefore, a new marker and method are needed that overcome the shortcomings described above.